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in the typical DB driven cms/ecommerce site you will have items pages at urls in some form similar to:

http://www.domain.com/item.php?id=36

1) Is it good for SEO purpose to add a sort of description (related to page contents) in url? i.e.

http://www.domain.com/item.php?id=36&descr=cheap-blue-jeans

even if descr key is not needed by the webapp to retrieve item from DB, thus making the url to work with/without the descr key and to show the same identical page.

I'm asking because for instance my profile on Pro Webmasters seem exactly to do this:

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/users/1429

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/users/1429/marco-demaio

They are the same url, the marco-demaio value is not needed, only the 1429 value is needed to get my profile from DB.

NOTE: in this last example I think also url rewrite is involved, but this question goes beyond urls rewrite, I'm not interested in rewriting any url here and to whoever is an url-rewrite-addict I would suggest to read this Google official article.

2) Supposing the answer to (1) is yes or almost yes, do I need to do a redirect 301 (or use canonical)? And if yes from http://...?id=36&descr=cheap-blue-jeans to http://...?id=36 or viceversa?

3) Supposing answer to (2) is "yes you better do redirect", why do I need a redirect (or canonical)? I mean do I even need redirect/canonical when I'm absolutely sure that my webapp will never link to both pages, so you will never find in the site the same page linked in two different ways (i.e. all link to id=36 will be in the form http://...?id=36&descr=cheap-blue-jeans so why does Google should care about http://...?id=36, I mean it should never get even indexed and therefor I should not ever have duplicated contents issues.

If you arrived here, thanks for the patience in reading into all this, and more thanks for any replies. :)

Community
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Marco Demaio
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4 Answers4

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The unfortunate thing about the Google article you posted is that it's almost creating more myths than it quashes. It's true that search engines do not have any problems indexing dynamic URLs, but static-looking URLs still tend to rank better.

The main reason is that when you create static URLs they are less "watered down" with irrelevant characters and keywords. If you take this, for example:

products.php?id=123&descr=product-name&view=comments

Here you have php, id, descr and view as essentially irrelevant keywords to the page. It won't actively harm your ranking, but in some ways it's akin to calling your brown dog photo my-black-cat.jpg.

As others have said, clear and concise URLs are best for users and search engines alike. products/123/product-name/comments is much easier to grasp than the above. If it's possible to have unique "slugs" in the URL, remove the ID and go with a format like products/product-name/comments.

To answer your questions more directly:

  1. Yes, that will improve SEO over just having the product ID. But it's still better for users to have a static-looking URL.
  2. Either or both is fine. I believe Canonical and 301 act the same in terms of passing PageRank etc. Normally canonical is used due to technical restrictions, or as a plaster.
  3. It depends on how and when you redirect. For example, if you only redirect when the descr parameter does not match the description for the product specified by id, you're missing the situation when someone goes to ?descr=cheap-blue-jeans&id=36. So it's always good to include it, in case you've missed a redirect.
DisgruntledGoat
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If the dynamic URL is crawled somehow by the Search Engine then a description wouldn't hurt. After all, its about helping the search engine to index pages better, ain't it?

Besides who is more recognizable 1429 or marco demaio?

Starx
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As always, putting users/usability first produces the best SEO results.

  1. Creating descriptive URLs helps both users and search engines know what the page is about. So, yes, it's always better to use http://domain.tld/product/36/cheap-blue-jeans than http://domain.tld/product/36.

  2. If the descriptive URL is more useful to users & search engines then naturally that's what you want to be indexed and to be used as the canonical URL.

  3. Better safe than sorry. Why would you risk creating duplicate content? There are no benefits to it, only harm. Would you create an unsecured backdoor to your website so long as it's not linked to from anywhere?

Lèse majesté
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This is why I'd hate industry made solutions.

I do everything by hand (I have my own framework and so on, so, speed to deliver is not an issue for me), in order to make site more userfriendly.

See the evolution:

The last one, IMHO, is the most concise, friendly and relevant option. What need' to achieve that?

  • mod_rewrite, as other solutions.
  • create a database index on the short description field, so we can keep things fast
  • a simple routine to find products by description, instead by id.

A few extra work, a significant bit of friendlyness to users. Yes, because, numbers in urls does say nothing to users, nor search engines. Keep support to them as fallback may be an option, but using only descriptions makes more sense to me.

Davis Peixoto
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